[Haskell-beginners] [Haskell-Beginners] Just

[Ertugrul Soeylemez]

KC <kc1956 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > From a more technical point of view, what 'Just' does is wrapping
> > data.  Whenever you see 'Just', keep in mind you're looking at a
> > data constructor.
>
> Would it be more correct to say that "Just" wraps a pure value?

That would be misleading.  First of all, think in terms of Maybe, not in
terms of Just.  "Just 3" is a value of type Maybe Integer just like
"True" is a value of type Bool.  There is really nothing special about
it.  Think of Maybe as a list type, which can contain at most one
element.  In that sense [] corresponds Nothing and [3] corresponds to
Just 3.  You can pattern-match against both of them in the same way:

    case maybeValue of
        Nothing -> "We got nothing."
        Just _  -> "We got a value."

    case listValue of
        []    -> "We got nothing."
        [_]   -> "We got one value."
        [_,_] -> "We got two values."
        _     -> "We got more than two values."

So why is it misleading?  Because (not considering that everything is
pure in Haskell) there is nothing impure about Maybe.


Greets,
Ertugrul


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